


love was for children (now he owes me a debt)

by Sosostris



Series: Five Years Later [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame Fix-It, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Gen, Natasha Romanov Lives, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-28 12:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18756613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sosostris/pseuds/Sosostris
Summary: When Natasha looks up, it’s to find his gaze already meeting hers, as though he’s expecting her to have figured it out – the same way she’s had to figure everything out, rebuilding from scratch, these past five years.





	love was for children (now he owes me a debt)

**Author's Note:**

> Because I have had it with clichés, with pointlessly noble sacrifices, with stories that make no sense.
> 
> Pour one out for Natalia Alianovna Romanova, the Black Widow.

**VORMIR, 2014.**

She lowers herself absently onto a convenient rock, while Clint slumps, heavy and ungainly, onto the ground.  Her fingers itch with nervous energy, and she has to resist the urge to pick at the tail of her braid.

When Natasha looks up, it’s to find his gaze already meeting hers, as though he’s expecting her to have figured it out – the same way she’s had to figure everything out, rebuilding from scratch, these past five years.

(What had she said to Scott earlier? That it must have been a long five years. Natasha has had long years before – long decades, really – but she has never felt the time as thoroughly as she does now.)

“Alright,” she says slowly. “I know what you’re going to say—”

“You saw what I did, Nat. I _deserve_ this.”

“—Yes, Clint, I knew that’s what you’d say.”

Her tone gets a little testy at this point, because he sometimes seems to have the insufferable notion that he gets a monopoly on determining what’s honourable and good, just because he made that call with her, once, on a dark night, on a rooftop. Once, and every day since.

So, no, it’s not that she hasn’t benefited from that before; she bites away the memory, rising unbidden, of their merry, bloody chases all over Europe, back when she was – when they were – different people.

But now is no time for sentiment. _Love is for children_ , she remembers again.

And with that, she _knows_.

Fresh resolve running through her, she bounces to her feet briskly, twitching her toes because she can start to feel the nails bruising in too-tight boots.

She dusts off her thighs, where the grit-laden snow has gathered from a surprisingly un-chilly wind.

“Don’t fight me,” Natasha says.

Of course, as he lurches belatedly to his own two feet, of _course_ Clint takes it as an invitation to do so.

She kicks out on instinct, dropping low and ready to flip her legs the wrong way around his throat. Then – because he hasn’t gotten up close in too long, and is all the more rusty for it – she cuffs him hard across the cheek, a stomach-churning gesture that reminds her of New York.

Clint rolls with the blow, his eyes dead, and Natasha pushes down her irritation at how easily his guilt can send him chasing the flicker of pain.

She takes a step back from him, forcing herself to relax. It’s like trying not to spook baby Nat on a colicky night, except that Clint will never outgrow the hair-trigger reflexes from his childhood, just as she’s never shed the preternatural calm. You make do with what you get, in your own ways.

“Listen to me,” she says, fighting to keep her tone even. “If you throw yourself off that cliff, not only do you never see your family again, but neither will I.”

Clint stills with a shock, and she’s satisfied at the tension that coils suddenly in him. She has his attention.

“Because you can’t make the trade – neither of us can.” She’s speaking slowly, exasperated and trying not to show it. “If the Skull is right – and, unlike Zola and his false dossiers, I don’t think the Stone allows him to lie – whoever wants the Stone has to be the one to pull the trigger on the other person.”

“I’m not doing that!” Clint starts to retort, his voice harsh, but she cuts him off.

“ _I’m not letting you_. Don’t you see? This trap wasn’t made for willing, well-meaning sacrifices. If I go over by myself, and you let me, I’m dead – and you’re empty-handed.”

Natasha pauses, then adds, “And if you do it, you’re dead, I’m still empty-handed, and I’m also very, very pissed.”

He’s been sluggish, numb, but the cogs are spinning now. She tilts her head back and waits for it to click.

When an old smirk plays tugs at the corner of his narrow mouth, she returns it with a wide grin.

“ _Boooooooy_ ,” says Clint, stretching out the vowel with a hint of Iowa. “I never expected that Leonardo DiCaprio would be here at the end of nowhere, saving the universe along with us.”

Natasha grasps his hand and pulls him closer. In her embrace, he smells of cordite and leather, of hours in cramped spaces together, of hours wrestling on SHIELD mats – of even longer, hard-won hours lying in the prickly hay to watch the moon in silence while Laura and the children slept, when their ledgers ran red.

“You jump, I jump,” she whispers. “Hasn’t that always been the both of us?”

“Since Budapest,” he says.

“No. Before.”

Her grip on him is very firm. Natasha doesn’t believe in doing things by halves.

She rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet first, tries to work herself up to it – a little part of her feels silly, but that’s how she knows she’s right, because anyone who does this without any twinge of fear would have to be stupid too – and takes a long, deep breath.

“On three?” she asks.

Almost instantly, he replies, “Three.”

Clint’s hand is warm against hers. The lip of the cliff comes up fast, too fast, and then they are running on air. The wind whistles and stings, just like she seems to remember, like Leningrad in the days of her youth.

***

Her pants are wet. Her jacket is wet. Her hair is wet, and everything hurts, even the hair.

That’s Natasha’s first thought, flat on her back, before second thoughts kick in quickly to establish that the pain is the stiffness of disused muscle and not – as one might have expected – the agony of being reduced to a bag of shattered bones.

Because she feels she’s earned it, and because she doubts that there’s anyone else left who could profit to hear it, she lets out a grunt as she cracks open her eyes. A sickly orange glow fills her field of vision.

There’s a small splash to her right, the sound of someone also running through an all-systems check to make sure his vitals still function. Fingers. Toes.

When she turns her head, it’s to find Clint with his other arm thrown up to shade his face. It’s an old, homely sight – Yasha is her oldest love, but Clint is her oldest friend – and she nestles into it, butting his shoulder with another grunt that turns into a chuckle.

In her palm, which is still curled with his, she feels something small and sharp-edged and gemlike digging into their skin.

**Author's Note:**

> Next up: “[Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden](https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women)” by Melanie Hamlett in _Harper’s Bazaar_ , May 2, 2019.


End file.
